TLC's My Strange Addiction had us at hello, but this does not mean we were prepared for the hairdryer addiction. Which is not what it sounds like.

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Minds out of the gutter! The hairdryer addiction is about sleeping. See, since she was a little girl, this woman's gone to sleep with a hairdryer, the heat and white noise of which she finds ample compensation for the risk of fire or electrocution.

Some of the behaviors — tanning, chalk and toilet-paper eating, for instance — are more immediately harmful. But weird as the habits may seem, the psychology is no different from that of any other addict. Once something is "soothing," says one psychiatrist — whatever that thing might be, for whatever reason — "the patterns are very hard to break."

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The woman who goes to six salons a day — in defiance of the law — is a good example.

But lest we judge, MSNBC reminds us, "It's important to remember that self-soothing strategies, of the non-extreme variety, are actually pretty common." Some are just less...socially acceptable than others.